Britain has doubled rig inspections. Bulgaria scrapped plans for a new oil pipeline. Chinese and French oil giants are upgrading equipment and procedures designed to prevent spills.
As oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, nations around the globe are taking a cue from this cautionary tale and ratcheting up their oversight of the industry.
“We must also deal with the possibility of an accident near our shores,” EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told the European Parliament in Strasbourg last week. “Drilling techniques have similarities even if the waters are much shallower in the North Sea.”
Canada’s offshore regulator is tightening oversight of its deepest-ever exploration well, being drilled by Chevron off the coast of Newfoundland. Meanwhile, China National Offshore Oil Corp says it is upgrading its blowout preventer system and diving equipment for a drilling rig being built in Shanghai.
France’s Total has formed two task forces to check facilities and strengthen contingency plans for any potential major pollution.
“We all saw what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov said.
The Bulgarian government canceled a new pipeline that would have carried Russian oil to Greece following resistance from residents of the Black Sea town of Burgas, where the pipeline was to start.
The Gulf catastrophe has also sparked a debate over the practice of deepwater drilling itself — with some viewing the spill as reason to ban it altogether.
“The very first victims were the fishermen in Louisiana,” the mass-circulation JoongAng newspaper in South Korea, where Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon rig was built, said in an editorial on Sunday. “But no one on earth is free from the impact of this disaster.”
The scrutiny reflects growing unease about firms seeking to drill farther out to sea and deeper than ever before. The process is expensive, risky and largely uncharted, highlighted by BP’s use of untested methods to try to stem the Gulf spill.
The most dramatic response has been in the US, which has banned offshore drilling in depths of 150m or more until late November. In addition, the regulatory body that oversees deepwater drilling is being overhauled, new permits will likely be tougher to come by and new safety measures are expected to be mandated.
US companies such as ConocoPhillips are reviewing safety measures while awaiting the results of investigations into the causes of the Gulf disaster. Others, including Anadarko Petroleum Corp, which has a 25 percent stake in BP’s gushing well, may relocate rigs idled by the US drilling ban to Brazil, which has been pushing ahead with its potentially lucrative deepwater fields in the Atlantic.
Reaction has been more muted in the oil-rich Middle East.
The spill is a “big problem, but it is not crisis,” said Shukri Ghanem, the head of Libya’s National Oil Corp, who serves as the North African nation’s de facto oil minister.
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